Dear Anne,
I seem to be turning to my own film as a matrix to contain all of my connections here. Your foam blob and your costume are still vibrating in my mind. In my work in Ambika P3 the rock at the end and the roving red blob (over bewitchment) made me love that nervous wobbling white blob thing that was hovering on your screen – only visible through that portal of the phone.
How the flinching blob reflected on that causal yet fragmented historical narrative was the crux of it perhaps?
In matter – where is history? I feel it is in it? In that foamy blob.
In matter – where is history? I feel it is in it? In that foamy blob.
I have been thinking that perhaps something of Bergson’s Creative Evolution is not so bonkers as it may have seemed in the long shadow of Darwinism, where erratic aberrations are at the route of evolution. But maybe there is something in it – he believed in the organism actually attempting to resolve a problem – through an élan vital? I have a feeling this may be emerging in scientific thought. Not sure but in DNA?
The clothing you made is another thing I am interested in. Dress to accommodate technology but not the body. Hilarious.
The image on my facebook homepage shows a woman dressed in a costume made to make her a Circassian beauty from PT Barnum’s travelling show. The women in his freak show (most beautiful women in the world?) back-combed their hair to look like an Afro – this was a throw back to the slave status of Circassian women who were thought to be the most prized women in a harem…at least that is what I think is going on with them…
Oh yes – BEAUTY, but they weren’t so beautiful.
Send me your thoughts – or an image?
The image on my facebook homepage shows a woman dressed in a costume made to make her a Circassian beauty from PT Barnum’s travelling show. The women in his freak show (most beautiful women in the world?) back-combed their hair to look like an Afro – this was a throw back to the slave status of Circassian women who were thought to be the most prized women in a harem…at least that is what I think is going on with them…
Oh yes – BEAUTY, but they weren’t so beautiful.
Send me your thoughts – or an image?
Lindsay x
Dear Nina,
we have a surprising amount of connections. I don’t know which to start with …
For many years I have been interested in the power of images to change things. Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad is a portal to another state of consciousness in its Neo-Platonist aspirations. When I was making those photographs in my mouth, which you mentioned, the act, the ritual, the chemistry, and the image didn’t feel so far from alchemy – and as for photographs – they write history. More than that. They are probably much more formative on us than we can comprehend. People are imprisoned or even executed for their photographic collections, that seems serious. I am always a little baffled when I am told I can not photograph what I am looking at – I can see it – it has been seen – doesn’t that show much more the photograph is deemed to be? I was told I could not photograph a bottle of perfume for sale in an airport duty free in Norway. I took about 300 pictures in UK duty free…
I love your dark mirror and the way it was wrapped. I looked at the box on the table many times in the morning – half wondering what was in it. But could never have guessed it would be obsidian from a volcano in Mexico – the material that John Dee used for his scrying. Looking up the Devil’s Anus? I think that must have been the reformists who called it that? Dee was speaking with angels.
Last night in my film there was an image of the Monad collapsing and some words about mathematics spoken over it – how mathematics has enslaved us.
Here is a link below to an image of me photographing a tree with my mouth in the grounds of a church that Dee was rector of. I have to shroud myself in a black body bag to get the paper in my mouth and then the images go red with light passing through the blood in the skin. There were also alchemical carvings scratched on the church porch wall that recall cave drawings – the magical image, an incantation.
http://www.lindsayseers.info/work_node/320#3
Here is a link below to an image of me photographing a tree with my mouth in the grounds of a church that Dee was rector of. I have to shroud myself in a black body bag to get the paper in my mouth and then the images go red with light passing through the blood in the skin. There were also alchemical carvings scratched on the church porch wall that recall cave drawings – the magical image, an incantation.
http://www.lindsayseers.info/work_node/320#3
Send me an image or some words.
Lindsay x
Lindsay x
Dear Jeremy,
finally I get to pareidolia! Leo Kelly connects us. I was travelling around Tasmania with a collapsible Tin Tabernacle so my fascination for Leo’s house was obvious. But his mind was more extraordinary than his house. I am sending you his stones and an image of his house…Jesus is a lot more present on the stone than the Virgin.
Send me an image or a thought
L x
Send me an image or a thought
L x
Dear Gunnlaug,
it is a very specific thing to grow up in a place leave it and not return for 35 years. That is quite a major thing to have in common. Formative.
As I mentioned I grew up in Mauritius and left at around the age of 8 in rather dramatic circumstances. To leave that unspoilt island paradise to a grey suburb in Birmingham leaving my father behind was a rupture.
I returned with my mother to Mauritius (who I had been estranged from for some years) to make a work in which she looked for a house that we lived in, that I had no memory of at all. Although I can remember in detail the two other houses we had. I felt that there was some blockage or trauma connected to this missing house. We never found the missing house.
The return however was phenomenal – but memory was strange. I could not immediately recognise things it came slowly as I walked around – it felt literally like my brain was looking for a neural pathway that had broken off through lack of use – a thought was rummaging around through a billion connections to locate itself – then in finding it sending a charge that struggled through it – which pulsed and fired and then suddenly the whole memory returned – but it was hardly ever instantaneous (it built like a wave). With the exception of a tree on the beach that I have always remembered. I used to love to sit in it and watch the ant colony moving over it. My feeling to find the little tree was ecstatic. The smell was the transcendental emotional trigger. I felt that – although this is hard to explain – that this tree and me were always connected – waiting for one another. Even as I write I fear for the tree but feel it is there. We are entangled the tree and me.
We are both wearing anchors around our necks.
As I mentioned I grew up in Mauritius and left at around the age of 8 in rather dramatic circumstances. To leave that unspoilt island paradise to a grey suburb in Birmingham leaving my father behind was a rupture.
I returned with my mother to Mauritius (who I had been estranged from for some years) to make a work in which she looked for a house that we lived in, that I had no memory of at all. Although I can remember in detail the two other houses we had. I felt that there was some blockage or trauma connected to this missing house. We never found the missing house.
The return however was phenomenal – but memory was strange. I could not immediately recognise things it came slowly as I walked around – it felt literally like my brain was looking for a neural pathway that had broken off through lack of use – a thought was rummaging around through a billion connections to locate itself – then in finding it sending a charge that struggled through it – which pulsed and fired and then suddenly the whole memory returned – but it was hardly ever instantaneous (it built like a wave). With the exception of a tree on the beach that I have always remembered. I used to love to sit in it and watch the ant colony moving over it. My feeling to find the little tree was ecstatic. The smell was the transcendental emotional trigger. I felt that – although this is hard to explain – that this tree and me were always connected – waiting for one another. Even as I write I fear for the tree but feel it is there. We are entangled the tree and me.
We are both wearing anchors around our necks.
I am having problems uploading images just now. I will send one shortly.
L x
L x
Dear Gunnlaug (2),
further to my previous post, this is the work I made about the return to Mauritius -it charts my inability to speak as a child and my later desire to become a camera – using my mouth to make images where words would normally form. The work is set in model of Edison’s first film studio – a kind of temple to the moment at which the movement of the still image began. Later in the film – in an act of extramission I eventually became a projector.
http://www.lindsayseers.info/exhibition_node/346#2
http://www.lindsayseers.info/exhibition_node/346#2
Dear Rachel, I am thinking about how sensory deprivation is a trigger for hallucination and a psychologist specialising in schizophrenia I have been working with did a number of simple experiments with students, reducing their sensory capacity, to investigate how easily the brain turns to creating its own world. Apparently hallucination is occurs quite quickly – but this does vary – depending on the individual. Hallucination and Pareidolia seem like friends?
I am excited you have introduced the possibility for us to experience the deprivation tanks. Lets try to book it in.
There is a connection also for me to Moss because of the anechoic chamber – another intense sensory deprivation. It is perhaps only in the lack of something we can sense its hidden quality? I think it important we try to do this.
Coincidently I was in Moss recently and filmed the radio vacuum tubes that were on display in the hotel I was in – they looked like alchemical jars so I used them in my film when Michael Bryne described himself as a biological radio. I am sending you these images and would be interested in how you might respond? I am really interested in this sense deprivation theme …these are vacuums used to produce sound …
L x
L x
Dear Monika, I would like to ask you about this phenomenon of pareidolia. What studies if any have been done on this? I am also curious to know if it relates to hallucination and what papers there are on hallucination – both drug induced and naturally occurring. It is claimed that Ketamine is the closest form of drug induced states to psychosis related to schizophrenia. R L Gregory states this but I wonder what the evidence is?
Dear (aka) Oliver Olson, we have met through a Klein Jar. I couldn’t help but use the object quasi erotically in my film. I am surprised to find at the screening last night a person who owns such a thing. Perhaps you foresaw it? But then I only decided to show the film one minute before doing it.
I like your comments on the Devil’s arsehole today and the history of the anus in art. I wonder if the devil, if indeed as you queried if he or she does excrete, he/she does it through an infinite surface. That seems to make sense?
I await your reply with anticipation. Just an image will do…?
Most sincerely
LP SEERS
I like your comments on the Devil’s arsehole today and the history of the anus in art. I wonder if the devil, if indeed as you queried if he or she does excrete, he/she does it through an infinite surface. That seems to make sense?
I await your reply with anticipation. Just an image will do…?
Most sincerely
LP SEERS
Dear Mila,
just now I had decided I needed to leave the room for a few moments due to cabin fever and found you with packs of tarot cards in your hands.
That your song lyrics of last night’s event were taken from a YouTube tarot reading is great but also brilliant as I think we can start a connection of exchange from this association.
just now I had decided I needed to leave the room for a few moments due to cabin fever and found you with packs of tarot cards in your hands.
That your song lyrics of last night’s event were taken from a YouTube tarot reading is great but also brilliant as I think we can start a connection of exchange from this association.
I had incidentally picked up a copy of a book by Crowley from my books shelf just before I left for Norway – The Book of Lies, such a great title. I guess because my way to Crowley was through Henri Bergson’s sister and that has shaped how I think of him – but your idea of his relationship to the full spectrum of the human psyche does seem relevant.
It was good to lay out the Crowley cards for you. I didn’t see that coming!
I had pulled a single card from the other small deck of yours and got THE THIEF. I wonder about that. There is a thief in me. I wondered if that was my role here – more a fear that that is my intention. I want to focus on the gift rather than stealing! I will keep an eye on that.
As I left you you mentioned numerology – can we turn to that? I am sending a chart from my film of last night to you – from John Dee.
Send me an image or a number!
L x
It was good to lay out the Crowley cards for you. I didn’t see that coming!
I had pulled a single card from the other small deck of yours and got THE THIEF. I wonder about that. There is a thief in me. I wondered if that was my role here – more a fear that that is my intention. I want to focus on the gift rather than stealing! I will keep an eye on that.
As I left you you mentioned numerology – can we turn to that? I am sending a chart from my film of last night to you – from John Dee.
Send me an image or a number!
L x
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